Thursday, May 26th, 2011

The feedback is in and it’s very positive! The Vario-E, our new weight based grinder that was launched in Houston at the SCAA, has been put to work! We were anxious to see how the Vario-E would perform in a live, busy coffee shop setting, so we loaned the only two we have to Noble Coffee in Ashland, OR and Thump Coffee in Bend, OR to put it through its paces. See our earlier blog for our story on Thump Coffee. We didn’t have an Esatto for them to try, but they were happy to have the Vario-E!

At Noble, they have been using it at their walkup window, brewing 2 Chemex at a time, all day long and going through around 25 pounds of coffee a week. They have around six different people using it.

Jared Rennie, Owner at Noble Coffee says “To sum it up, we love it! It saves us SO much time, the accuracy is wonderful, the footprint is great, and everyone loves it”. One piece of feedback from Jared was a desire for a larger hopper and we were glad that we were able to let him know that we’ve already manufactured hopper extenders (which will work with all our hoppers BTW). Each extension adds 9oz capacity, about 3 to 4 inches in additional height and can be stacked up to 3 high. They will be available from our website at the end of July.

Kent Chapple from Thump Coffee is really pleased with the consistency of the weight, using the Vario-E, in comparison to the pre-weighing approach they previously used with their Ditting. For him, the hopper size is not an issue as they like how the grinder fits neatly under their overhead cabinets.

Kent says “Initial brews have the staff very excited. We are producing delicious coffee with much less hassle and mess. Use of the machine is very intuitive and after I set the grind, the training time for another barista was about 30 seconds”.

Interest is high on the Vario-E and the Esatto and we are in production now. We plan to have them available in North America at the end of July!